Enjoy your time in Italy, Matt. I’ve visited twice and I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world to spend a few weeks, if not a lifetime. Do Italians live better lives than Americans? See what you think. Might become the subject of a future column. Not everything is a result of policy decisions.
Did u guys see Matt’s retweet about Fox News now being concerned falling gas prices may hurt mom and pop gas stations? Amazing stuff the pivot function on the spin machine is a site to behold.
One big reason why Americans don't care too much about climate change is that no realistic projections of climate change impacts show anything particularly negative happening in the next 50 years within the US border, the sole exception being a few low-lying coastal areas. Some leftist activists try to lie and claim that we'll be doomed very soon even in places like Colorado, but the average voter has no reason to believe them. So in practice we would start doing serious climate stuff in ~50 years when negative impacts will finally be imminent. Until then its business as usual.
Probably, given other constraints. In principle one could make and zero carbon investment that has negative returns even with correctly priced CO2 emissions. [I suspect biofuels fall in this category]
I think it is not quite right to call geothermal energy “essentially limitless” - overall there is not enough geothermal energy that it could replace all human energy consumption. Solar+wind could, so they are meaningfully larger in potential magnitude.
This is not correct. It is a bit like "Our oil reserves are only enough to last until 20XX." Oil reserves are the amount of oil that is extractable at today's oil price (and technology). Worldwide energy usage is around 15TW presently. There is far more geothermal energy than that available but upfront costs associated with accessing it are prohibitive. That could quickly change much as it did with solar.
My understanding was that the problem is fundamental physical limits rather than costs per se. I went looking for a decent reference and could only find one in a book rather than a webpage. Here's an excerpt from (admittedly not a pro-geothermal source) The Future Of Fusion Energy:
"Unfortunately, the Earth is a poor thermal conductor, so the heat leaks up to our wells very slowly. We can calculate exactly how slowly by observing that, 40 kilometers below ground, the temperature is roughly 600°C. By multiplying this temperature gradient (i.e. 0.015°C/m) by the thermal conductivity of rock (i.e. 2 W/m/°C), we see that 0.03 Watts of geothermal energy is continually passing through each square meter of the Earth’s surface. When totaled over the whole planet, we find that it barely exceeds humanity’s current total power consumption. Thus, although the Earth contains enough geothermal energy to satisfy our current consumption for 10 billion years, we can’t take advantage of it. The energy conducts to the surface so slowly that we can’t really access it. If we try to draw energy more quickly it becomes unsustainable as it will cool down the rocks surrounding our wells and reduce the geothermal energy available in the future. Unless we manually increase the bulk thermal conductivity of the Earth to allow the heat to escape faster (e.g. millions of wells that span a sizable fraction of the Earth’s radius), this represents a fundamental limit on geothermal energy."
The thing you are quoting says there is enough energy to serve all of our needs for "10 billion years." The issue is being able to get that energy out. Obviously, as you go deeper it gets hotter and this becomes less of an issue. Drilling more holes is costly but scales the rate of heat transfer.
Nothing in that quote suggests there is not enough energy or that a method cannot be achieved to allow it to be extracted. It just says that for a given depth of 1 well you can get X energy.
The major issue with geothermal is there has to be magma body close to the surface to continuously provide heat, otherwise you just drain the rock of the little heat it has and wells only produce for a short period of time. The reason why Clear Lake, CA is the biggest geothermal plant in the US is because it is a volcano. Yellowstone can provide a lot of geothermal energy, but for some obvious reasons we don't have plants there.
I should probably add on that one thing that helps that Risch-Fulcher bill happen is that Idaho had long been one of only two states (Vermont the other) that had no coal power plants within its borders. I *think* Oregon has finally joined them by shutting down Boardman, and hopefully Washington will be right behind them soon to make the Northwest trifecta if they can shut down Centralia.
Granted, that's pretty small potatoes (small sugar beets?), but it is there. That's the only one I see on the U.S. Energy Information Administration map.
legitimately induction stoves are better. They heat up faster, they deliver more heat, they're cool to the touch, and there's much less indoor air pollution. I hate electric ranges but induction stoves are fantastic
This is related to one area that I believe climate policy people have not put a lot of thought into: electricity outages. If we electrify everything, it is not like we are going to magically make storms that knock down electric lines go away. But by getting rid of liquid/gas fuels entirely, we will have made electricity outages much worse than they already are. You can at least light a gas stove with a match. No matter how cool induction stoves are, they don't work without electricity. And this goes beyond stoves. If we are going to get rid of gas stoves, aren't we also going to get rid of gasoline or propane generators? Gas hot water heaters? These things work without electricity.
Maybe not the ones you're talking with, but I assure you that increasing grid resiliency is a topic of concern among climate and energy policy researchers I work with (like this https://energystorage.lbl.gov/field-trip/grid-resilience/). Part of electrifying everything is to increase the amount of electricity we deliver dramatically, and that necessarily means making the grid more robust and diversify infrastructure. If climate wonks had our way there would be interregional transmission and way more distributed energy resources which would result in greater reliability not less (https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-423t).
Everything depends on the relative price of gas and electricity and the costs of alternative means of reducing the costs of electrical outages. Homes could have batteries, distribution companies can bury the lines or Carbon capture ad sequestration could make continued use of gas cost effective. That is exactly the advantage of taxation of net CO2 emissions. We don't have to solve this kind of problem in advance.
Unfortunately, when you have elite consensus that we should tackle climate change but a super-majority of people are opposing to spending even $100 a year on it, what you get is a bunch of decisions made in hidden channels that result much less $ efficient carbon reduction than a carbon tax.
I wonder how much the elites who agree that we Should tackle climate change would be willing to pay?
Of course the amount paid in tax is not a good measure of the cost of the tax. As with any excise tax we need to look at the deadweight loss, roughly, how painful would it be to pay $2000 a year more for fuel and electricity and get a check for $2000 at the end of the year?
In the world where we are building hundreds of GWh of grid-scale battery storage, it would be pretty affordable to have some battery storage in your own house. In a world where we electrified transportation, most US households would already have that battery storage in the form of their car.
If you were just trying to cook / run some space heaters, a Tesla Model 3 car battery at half charge (random guess of its charge state at time of blackout) would have...25 kWh of electricity (for the lowest tier, if my quick Google is right). That's enough to run a 1kW space heater for a day and still have enough juice left over for some microwaving. Not a ton, but definitely not nothing.
IF we had a scaleable, real, cost-effective carbon removal solution, it would almost certainly be preferable to keep natural gas lines running since we already have the infrastructure and it does add resilience. But that's a big IF. (I'm hoping Project Vesta has a breakthrough here)
I was kinda joking, kinda not. I love to cook and spent most of my life using those crappy coil electric stoves that come in cheap apartments and have a nice gas range for the first time in my life and love it and will be loathe to give it up in the near future, but I can come around. I have heard this before, what makes them vastly superior? I'm guessing they move heat into the pan faster and with better control? I'll believe it better when I actually cook on one.
I have no personal experience with induction stoves, but I desperately want to switch to one as soon as I have the opportunity, because I think my gas stove is probably really, really bad for me. See e.g. https://dynomight.net/stoves/ .
Exactly - faster heat, better control. The kitchen doesn't heat up and it's much better for indoor air quality. When I was using induction, I could actually simmer!
I had an induction range during a temporary pandemic move and I miss it every day - to my extreme chagrin, my old NYC building doesn't have the electrical capacity for me to install induction here. I would literally consider moving to be able to have induction again, especially if in-unit laundry is part of the deal...
I grew up using a gas stove because that's what's in my house, but when I was in Paris with Felix his studio had an induction range and that thing got really hot really quick. Only downside is that in principle you can't char things over a flame but I don't think I've ever actually done that, so.
That's a strong endorsement! I'm probably overly attached to the aesthetics of the gas stove. For some reason I am way more willing to switch to an electric car for example.
There is a bit of a learning curve, but it is seriously amazing. I honestly hate firing up a gas burner now! The only downside IMO is that you can't roast a pepper using an induction burner (but you can do it in the oven or braise red pepper strips on the stovetop).
In a typically NPR-like story about climate change and alternative energy that I heard yesterday, the reporter casually stated, "nuclear power may be carbon-free but it does, of course, have a different form of environmental pollution to worry about- nuclear waste." It did prompt me to realize that in all the pro-nuclear green energy convos, I only hear about Chernobyl/Fukushima-type events, and don't ever hear about nuclear waste. Have we "solved" what to do about nuclear waste yet? I honestly don't know much about it!
Harry Reid heroically blocked the nuclear repository from being set up in Nevada to avoid triggering an intergalactic incident with the aliens camped out in Area 51 /s
I don't work in the nuclear industry so I don't have any special insider knowledge about nuclear waste management, but my understanding is that we've mostly solved the technical side of things but are having trouble getting permission to build permanent storage for NIMBY reasons.
Yucca Mountain in Nevada was the US designated site for storage but Nevadans really really don't want it there and successfully blocked the project.
My environmental policy has long been the same as my housing policy: build build build build. Construct all the non-fossil fuel energy you can, it's the only plausible way I see getting out of this mess, and if it succeeds, much of the "loud" stuff can just naturally go away. One of the most thrilling categories of Matt's articles here is strong concurrence with that policy goal.
Something I feel weird about is the neopastoral approach is really bad but at the same time it really is likely to be a lot worse for Earth’s other life forms.
Like If humanity comes through the other side with techical do we just have to be like well we didn’t need so much biodiversity and it’s okay if the oceans acidify and environment loss pushes more species to endangered status or extinction? I mean I guess we’re in tragic choice mode but it seems like this is unbelievably bad.
Even if like our wishes were made true and everything goes the best it’s still going to unleash an unimaginable amount of loss.
The other issue with climate change is the fear that the burdens fall disproportionately on lower income people. Look at California as a perfect example. Abroad, this is what triggered the "yellow vest" movement in France. Tied to that is the issue that hundreds of thousands of Americans work in fossil fuel related ndustries; like it or not, these jobs are often very well paying. I doubt retrofitting buildings with solar panels woukd be as lucrative. In short, climate change advocates have not yet made a sufficiently persuasive case that these workers have an economically promising future. And if these same workers raise their concerns, they are often dismissed as "deplorables", hardly a way to generate broad-based support for measures loudly advocated by billionaires like Mike Bloomberg or Tom Steyer (who incidentally made a fortune investing in those very fossil fuel industries that he now disparages).
This is basically a question of what you do with the revenue from the tax on net CO2 emissions. There are lots of claimants: reduction in the wage tax, straight per capita rebate, subsidizing mitigation/adjustment (subsidizing retrofitting of oil heat to heat pumps, etc.).
Well, it hurts everybody. Not sure it disproportionately impacts lower income people. But the manner in which it is being addressed indisputably DOES impact lower income people more. To cite one example: California’s decarbonization policies include a requirement for 100% zero-carbon electricity and an economy-wide goal of carbon neutrality by 2045. But the pursuit of those goals has come with a big price tag—and one not borne equally by rich and poor. Since 2008, according to the EIA, the all-sector cost of electricity in the Golden State has grown five times faster than rates in the rest of the continental U.S. Those increases hurt lower income Californians much more than the rich, who can afford to cover their massive roofs with solar panels. Look at what Robert Apodaca, a longtime Latino activist and the executive director of United Latinos Vote, had to say about this: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b3d7e368f5130df89800d7f/t/5f7503b9a3a36f457379cb33/1601504188963/Sierra+Club.pdf
Oh it unambiguously will disproportionately impact the poor. On one hand, the places which are least resilient to climate disruption (low lying island nations, hot and humid equatorial places) are among the poorest on earth. For geographic reasons, Canada will be much less hurt by climate change than will Bangladesh. Some of it is in the conventional way that a lot of environmental justice problems work which is that the poor are unable to relocate away from environmental harms. If you open up a toxic waste factory, the rich people move away from the problem while the poor are stuck with it. It is true that everywhere will be impacted from climate change, but those impacts won't be equivalent, and the rich can move away from unlivable hellscapes while the poor are stuck. Finally, climate resilience costs money. The rich can afford air conditioning, they can afford to retrofit their homes. The marginal cost of adaptation is just more impactful on the budgets of the poor, both in the global sense as well as local low income people.
Mind you, I'm all in favour of Damascene conversions. Al Gore was in the same boat. But Steyer has never really addressed this. Reminds me of the line from the former UK Cabinet Minister, Tony Crosland, a Labour Party Minister who said of environmentalists that they "had a manifest class bias, and reflects a set of middle and upper class value judgements. Its champions are often kindly and dedicated people. But they are affluent and fundamentally, though of course not consciously, they want to kick the ladder down behind them. They are highly selective in their concern, being militant mainly about threats to rural peace and wildlife and well loved beauty spots: they are little concerned with the far more desperate problem of the urban environment in which 80 per cent of our fellow citizens live"
There seems to be a decent (liberal) consensus that a Carbon Tax is a good idea, but just not politically feasible.
Since you mentioned Social Security's humble beginnings, I'd like some policy wonk (cough cough) that knows more than I do to come up with some clever way of getting a teeny-tiny carbon tax on the books, and then expanded it over time.
Go ahead and effectively bribe the populace by using the proceeds to send out refund checks out at first, though obviously it would be better to direct the money to green infrastructure and R&D...
I don't think that will work because the benefits would be diffuse. Social Security expanded over time because the elderly became a concentrated interest group voting for it AND there was societal consensus that they """deserved""" some degree of help.
"I'd like some policy wonk (cough cough) that knows more than I do to come up with some clever way of getting a teeny-tiny carbon tax on the books, and then expanded it over time."
I was pointing out that the "expanded it over time" part is where the paralllel to Social Security fails. If the only reason you are pushing for a teeny-tiny carbon tax is because you think you'll be able to grow it in the future, that's probably not worth it and the policy effort should be invested somewhere else that has a bettered expected return.
EDIT:
For an example of a carbon-tax that has shrunk rather than expanded overtime because it is very unpopular, see the gas tax.
Enjoy your time in Italy, Matt. I’ve visited twice and I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world to spend a few weeks, if not a lifetime. Do Italians live better lives than Americans? See what you think. Might become the subject of a future column. Not everything is a result of policy decisions.
Did u guys see Matt’s retweet about Fox News now being concerned falling gas prices may hurt mom and pop gas stations? Amazing stuff the pivot function on the spin machine is a site to behold.
Be careful, Matt. Buy tickets and follow the rules.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/tourist-23-falls-mount-vesuvius-27455015?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark
“An American tourist is facing charges in Italy after falling into the crater of Mount Vesuvius while trying to recover his mobile phone.
The 23-year-old man, along with three relatives, had chosen not to pay for tickets to walk up the official safe route on Saturday (July 9).”
One big reason why Americans don't care too much about climate change is that no realistic projections of climate change impacts show anything particularly negative happening in the next 50 years within the US border, the sole exception being a few low-lying coastal areas. Some leftist activists try to lie and claim that we'll be doomed very soon even in places like Colorado, but the average voter has no reason to believe them. So in practice we would start doing serious climate stuff in ~50 years when negative impacts will finally be imminent. Until then its business as usual.
Where in Italy? Big fan of Italy, hot take I know, I hope you come back having gained about 15 lbs in pure pasta weight.
Broke: Taxing and otherwise raising the costs of fossil fuels.
Woke: Imposing negative taxes on (i.e. subsidizing) cleaner sources of energy.
Feel like we haven't done enough? Then rinse and repeat.
Bespoke: just build cleaner sources of energy however you can without worrying much about the tax ledger.
Probably, given other constraints. In principle one could make and zero carbon investment that has negative returns even with correctly priced CO2 emissions. [I suspect biofuels fall in this category]
I would consider that to be encompassed within "negative taxes," broadly construed.
I think it is not quite right to call geothermal energy “essentially limitless” - overall there is not enough geothermal energy that it could replace all human energy consumption. Solar+wind could, so they are meaningfully larger in potential magnitude.
This is not correct. It is a bit like "Our oil reserves are only enough to last until 20XX." Oil reserves are the amount of oil that is extractable at today's oil price (and technology). Worldwide energy usage is around 15TW presently. There is far more geothermal energy than that available but upfront costs associated with accessing it are prohibitive. That could quickly change much as it did with solar.
My understanding was that the problem is fundamental physical limits rather than costs per se. I went looking for a decent reference and could only find one in a book rather than a webpage. Here's an excerpt from (admittedly not a pro-geothermal source) The Future Of Fusion Energy:
"Unfortunately, the Earth is a poor thermal conductor, so the heat leaks up to our wells very slowly. We can calculate exactly how slowly by observing that, 40 kilometers below ground, the temperature is roughly 600°C. By multiplying this temperature gradient (i.e. 0.015°C/m) by the thermal conductivity of rock (i.e. 2 W/m/°C), we see that 0.03 Watts of geothermal energy is continually passing through each square meter of the Earth’s surface. When totaled over the whole planet, we find that it barely exceeds humanity’s current total power consumption. Thus, although the Earth contains enough geothermal energy to satisfy our current consumption for 10 billion years, we can’t take advantage of it. The energy conducts to the surface so slowly that we can’t really access it. If we try to draw energy more quickly it becomes unsustainable as it will cool down the rocks surrounding our wells and reduce the geothermal energy available in the future. Unless we manually increase the bulk thermal conductivity of the Earth to allow the heat to escape faster (e.g. millions of wells that span a sizable fraction of the Earth’s radius), this represents a fundamental limit on geothermal energy."
The thing you are quoting says there is enough energy to serve all of our needs for "10 billion years." The issue is being able to get that energy out. Obviously, as you go deeper it gets hotter and this becomes less of an issue. Drilling more holes is costly but scales the rate of heat transfer.
Nothing in that quote suggests there is not enough energy or that a method cannot be achieved to allow it to be extracted. It just says that for a given depth of 1 well you can get X energy.
The major issue with geothermal is there has to be magma body close to the surface to continuously provide heat, otherwise you just drain the rock of the little heat it has and wells only produce for a short period of time. The reason why Clear Lake, CA is the biggest geothermal plant in the US is because it is a volcano. Yellowstone can provide a lot of geothermal energy, but for some obvious reasons we don't have plants there.
I should probably add on that one thing that helps that Risch-Fulcher bill happen is that Idaho had long been one of only two states (Vermont the other) that had no coal power plants within its borders. I *think* Oregon has finally joined them by shutting down Boardman, and hopefully Washington will be right behind them soon to make the Northwest trifecta if they can shut down Centralia.
"Idaho had long been one of only two states (Vermont the other) that had no coal power plants within its borders."
https://www.gem.wiki/Amalgamated_Sugar_Twin_Falls_Power_Plant
Granted, that's pretty small potatoes (small sugar beets?), but it is there. That's the only one I see on the U.S. Energy Information Administration map.
You can pry my gas stove from my cold, nice, upscale liberal hands.
legitimately induction stoves are better. They heat up faster, they deliver more heat, they're cool to the touch, and there's much less indoor air pollution. I hate electric ranges but induction stoves are fantastic
This is related to one area that I believe climate policy people have not put a lot of thought into: electricity outages. If we electrify everything, it is not like we are going to magically make storms that knock down electric lines go away. But by getting rid of liquid/gas fuels entirely, we will have made electricity outages much worse than they already are. You can at least light a gas stove with a match. No matter how cool induction stoves are, they don't work without electricity. And this goes beyond stoves. If we are going to get rid of gas stoves, aren't we also going to get rid of gasoline or propane generators? Gas hot water heaters? These things work without electricity.
Maybe not the ones you're talking with, but I assure you that increasing grid resiliency is a topic of concern among climate and energy policy researchers I work with (like this https://energystorage.lbl.gov/field-trip/grid-resilience/). Part of electrifying everything is to increase the amount of electricity we deliver dramatically, and that necessarily means making the grid more robust and diversify infrastructure. If climate wonks had our way there would be interregional transmission and way more distributed energy resources which would result in greater reliability not less (https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-423t).
Keep a camping stove and bottle of propane in your basement for emergencies:)
Everything depends on the relative price of gas and electricity and the costs of alternative means of reducing the costs of electrical outages. Homes could have batteries, distribution companies can bury the lines or Carbon capture ad sequestration could make continued use of gas cost effective. That is exactly the advantage of taxation of net CO2 emissions. We don't have to solve this kind of problem in advance.
Unfortunately, when you have elite consensus that we should tackle climate change but a super-majority of people are opposing to spending even $100 a year on it, what you get is a bunch of decisions made in hidden channels that result much less $ efficient carbon reduction than a carbon tax.
I wonder how much the elites who agree that we Should tackle climate change would be willing to pay?
Of course the amount paid in tax is not a good measure of the cost of the tax. As with any excise tax we need to look at the deadweight loss, roughly, how painful would it be to pay $2000 a year more for fuel and electricity and get a check for $2000 at the end of the year?
In the world where we are building hundreds of GWh of grid-scale battery storage, it would be pretty affordable to have some battery storage in your own house. In a world where we electrified transportation, most US households would already have that battery storage in the form of their car.
If you were just trying to cook / run some space heaters, a Tesla Model 3 car battery at half charge (random guess of its charge state at time of blackout) would have...25 kWh of electricity (for the lowest tier, if my quick Google is right). That's enough to run a 1kW space heater for a day and still have enough juice left over for some microwaving. Not a ton, but definitely not nothing.
IF we had a scaleable, real, cost-effective carbon removal solution, it would almost certainly be preferable to keep natural gas lines running since we already have the infrastructure and it does add resilience. But that's a big IF. (I'm hoping Project Vesta has a breakthrough here)
For this reason I have been tracking the Diablo Canyon debate here in CA. Count me in the pro-nuclear camp.
Induction is vastly superior, based on my extensive experience cooking on both types of ranges.
I was kinda joking, kinda not. I love to cook and spent most of my life using those crappy coil electric stoves that come in cheap apartments and have a nice gas range for the first time in my life and love it and will be loathe to give it up in the near future, but I can come around. I have heard this before, what makes them vastly superior? I'm guessing they move heat into the pan faster and with better control? I'll believe it better when I actually cook on one.
I have no personal experience with induction stoves, but I desperately want to switch to one as soon as I have the opportunity, because I think my gas stove is probably really, really bad for me. See e.g. https://dynomight.net/stoves/ .
Exactly - faster heat, better control. The kitchen doesn't heat up and it's much better for indoor air quality. When I was using induction, I could actually simmer!
I had an induction range during a temporary pandemic move and I miss it every day - to my extreme chagrin, my old NYC building doesn't have the electrical capacity for me to install induction here. I would literally consider moving to be able to have induction again, especially if in-unit laundry is part of the deal...
I grew up using a gas stove because that's what's in my house, but when I was in Paris with Felix his studio had an induction range and that thing got really hot really quick. Only downside is that in principle you can't char things over a flame but I don't think I've ever actually done that, so.
When I have access to induction, I require all visitors to sit through a demo of speed boiling!
That's a strong endorsement! I'm probably overly attached to the aesthetics of the gas stove. For some reason I am way more willing to switch to an electric car for example.
There is a bit of a learning curve, but it is seriously amazing. I honestly hate firing up a gas burner now! The only downside IMO is that you can't roast a pepper using an induction burner (but you can do it in the oven or braise red pepper strips on the stovetop).
I was thinking about tortillas for that reason. I'm often thinking about tortillas tbh.
In a typically NPR-like story about climate change and alternative energy that I heard yesterday, the reporter casually stated, "nuclear power may be carbon-free but it does, of course, have a different form of environmental pollution to worry about- nuclear waste." It did prompt me to realize that in all the pro-nuclear green energy convos, I only hear about Chernobyl/Fukushima-type events, and don't ever hear about nuclear waste. Have we "solved" what to do about nuclear waste yet? I honestly don't know much about it!
Yes, we solved it but Harry Reid wouldn't let us actually do it. :)
Harry Reid heroically blocked the nuclear repository from being set up in Nevada to avoid triggering an intergalactic incident with the aliens camped out in Area 51 /s
I don't work in the nuclear industry so I don't have any special insider knowledge about nuclear waste management, but my understanding is that we've mostly solved the technical side of things but are having trouble getting permission to build permanent storage for NIMBY reasons.
Yucca Mountain in Nevada was the US designated site for storage but Nevadans really really don't want it there and successfully blocked the project.
Finland is building a permanent storage facility: https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-store-nuclear-waste-can-it-survive-100000-years
One of my favorite statements in this regard:
The problem with nuclear power is when everything goes wrong.
The problem with coal power is when everything goes right.
Invisible externalities of coal unless you're an epidemiologist.
My environmental policy has long been the same as my housing policy: build build build build. Construct all the non-fossil fuel energy you can, it's the only plausible way I see getting out of this mess, and if it succeeds, much of the "loud" stuff can just naturally go away. One of the most thrilling categories of Matt's articles here is strong concurrence with that policy goal.
So, your plan is to say it quietly and then repost it at intervals.
I hope it works!
Something I feel weird about is the neopastoral approach is really bad but at the same time it really is likely to be a lot worse for Earth’s other life forms.
Like If humanity comes through the other side with techical do we just have to be like well we didn’t need so much biodiversity and it’s okay if the oceans acidify and environment loss pushes more species to endangered status or extinction? I mean I guess we’re in tragic choice mode but it seems like this is unbelievably bad.
Even if like our wishes were made true and everything goes the best it’s still going to unleash an unimaginable amount of loss.
Elon Musk & Bezos trying to move humanity off-planet, because in space no one can hear you urban sprawl.
Biden is toast, Yglesias for President.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/11/us/politics/biden-approval-polling-2024.html
The other issue with climate change is the fear that the burdens fall disproportionately on lower income people. Look at California as a perfect example. Abroad, this is what triggered the "yellow vest" movement in France. Tied to that is the issue that hundreds of thousands of Americans work in fossil fuel related ndustries; like it or not, these jobs are often very well paying. I doubt retrofitting buildings with solar panels woukd be as lucrative. In short, climate change advocates have not yet made a sufficiently persuasive case that these workers have an economically promising future. And if these same workers raise their concerns, they are often dismissed as "deplorables", hardly a way to generate broad-based support for measures loudly advocated by billionaires like Mike Bloomberg or Tom Steyer (who incidentally made a fortune investing in those very fossil fuel industries that he now disparages).
This is basically a question of what you do with the revenue from the tax on net CO2 emissions. There are lots of claimants: reduction in the wage tax, straight per capita rebate, subsidizing mitigation/adjustment (subsidizing retrofitting of oil heat to heat pumps, etc.).
Of course, failing to address climate change also results in a burden that also falls disproportionately on lower income people.
Well, it hurts everybody. Not sure it disproportionately impacts lower income people. But the manner in which it is being addressed indisputably DOES impact lower income people more. To cite one example: California’s decarbonization policies include a requirement for 100% zero-carbon electricity and an economy-wide goal of carbon neutrality by 2045. But the pursuit of those goals has come with a big price tag—and one not borne equally by rich and poor. Since 2008, according to the EIA, the all-sector cost of electricity in the Golden State has grown five times faster than rates in the rest of the continental U.S. Those increases hurt lower income Californians much more than the rich, who can afford to cover their massive roofs with solar panels. Look at what Robert Apodaca, a longtime Latino activist and the executive director of United Latinos Vote, had to say about this: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b3d7e368f5130df89800d7f/t/5f7503b9a3a36f457379cb33/1601504188963/Sierra+Club.pdf
Oh it unambiguously will disproportionately impact the poor. On one hand, the places which are least resilient to climate disruption (low lying island nations, hot and humid equatorial places) are among the poorest on earth. For geographic reasons, Canada will be much less hurt by climate change than will Bangladesh. Some of it is in the conventional way that a lot of environmental justice problems work which is that the poor are unable to relocate away from environmental harms. If you open up a toxic waste factory, the rich people move away from the problem while the poor are stuck with it. It is true that everywhere will be impacted from climate change, but those impacts won't be equivalent, and the rich can move away from unlivable hellscapes while the poor are stuck. Finally, climate resilience costs money. The rich can afford air conditioning, they can afford to retrofit their homes. The marginal cost of adaptation is just more impactful on the budgets of the poor, both in the global sense as well as local low income people.
*Makes mental note to be wary if Tom Steyer ever organizes a "World Grand Prix" to promote an alternative fuel.*
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/19/21030422/tom-steyer-fossil-fuels-2020-democratic-debate-candidate-billionaire
Mind you, I'm all in favour of Damascene conversions. Al Gore was in the same boat. But Steyer has never really addressed this. Reminds me of the line from the former UK Cabinet Minister, Tony Crosland, a Labour Party Minister who said of environmentalists that they "had a manifest class bias, and reflects a set of middle and upper class value judgements. Its champions are often kindly and dedicated people. But they are affluent and fundamentally, though of course not consciously, they want to kick the ladder down behind them. They are highly selective in their concern, being militant mainly about threats to rural peace and wildlife and well loved beauty spots: they are little concerned with the far more desperate problem of the urban environment in which 80 per cent of our fellow citizens live"
There seems to be a decent (liberal) consensus that a Carbon Tax is a good idea, but just not politically feasible.
Since you mentioned Social Security's humble beginnings, I'd like some policy wonk (cough cough) that knows more than I do to come up with some clever way of getting a teeny-tiny carbon tax on the books, and then expanded it over time.
Go ahead and effectively bribe the populace by using the proceeds to send out refund checks out at first, though obviously it would be better to direct the money to green infrastructure and R&D...
I don't think that will work because the benefits would be diffuse. Social Security expanded over time because the elderly became a concentrated interest group voting for it AND there was societal consensus that they """deserved""" some degree of help.
The initial point would just be to get a carbon tax on the board, with minimal political cost
It would cost political capital to expand it afterwardsm
"I'd like some policy wonk (cough cough) that knows more than I do to come up with some clever way of getting a teeny-tiny carbon tax on the books, and then expanded it over time."
I was pointing out that the "expanded it over time" part is where the paralllel to Social Security fails. If the only reason you are pushing for a teeny-tiny carbon tax is because you think you'll be able to grow it in the future, that's probably not worth it and the policy effort should be invested somewhere else that has a bettered expected return.
EDIT:
For an example of a carbon-tax that has shrunk rather than expanded overtime because it is very unpopular, see the gas tax.